Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2019

Christmas In Tobruk (1943)

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014

Full title reads: “CHRISTMAS IN TOBRUK”.

Tobruk, Libya.

Several shots of Pathe cameraman Terry Ashwood in his pyjamas as he gets up from his bed in the desert. He looks into his Christmas stocking and reads his cards. Bell on Tobruk Church ringing. Various shots of sacks of mail being sorted at desert sorting post. Several shots of ruined buildings in Tobruk where the Tommies are having their own. They write Merry Xmas on the wall and seem to be enjoying themselves. Soldiers ironing their clothes, “dress up” set the table and serve dinner. Men sitting at table with “Merry Christmas” written on the wall behind them. Christmas feast. Christmas pudding with a twig instead of piece of holly. Men drinking. Terry Ashwood leaving building and it is “snowing”. Pan up to show the men ripping paper into small pieces and throwing it from the balcony.

(Mute & Track Negs.)
FILM ID:1071.21

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Expanding the definition again: “terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Offensensitivity hits the eggheads:

Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck.

Likewise wonk, smarty-pants, and know-it-all: these terms are “divisive and humiliating,” and the “last taboo,” the University of East London egghead said this week while promoting her new book about brainiacs. Such “anti-IQ” words set society’s Einsteins apart, she claimed, with the result that geeks end up “feeling like they’re a misfit and don’t belong.”

Calling someone a swot, whizkid, brainbox, smart-arse, or dweeb may seem “harmless banter,” but it is equivalent to hate speech, she reckons, and should be recognized as such in British law – with punishments including fines and imprisonment. “It is only with the benefit of hindsight and academic research that we realise how wrong we were,” she added.

That academic research includes her new book titled Extreme Intelligence, for which she interviewed 20 nerds for 90 minutes about when they realized they were so very clever.

She then embarked on a “contextual analysis of literature” and decided that calling someone a boffin was equivalent to the worst racial slurs. “The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s,” she said during her book launch, before noting that “other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently.”

Dr Falck does not have a chip on her shoulder, despite the fact that the whole idea behind the book stemmed from the fact that as a child she was offered a place at a school for gifted children but her mother turned it down because she feared it would result in her becoming socially difficult.

December 20, 2019

“Seven Pillars of Wisdom” – T. E. Lawrence of Arabia – Sabaton History 046 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Middle East, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published 19 Dec 2019

The British T.E. Lawrence played a major role in bringing together a coalition of Arab factions to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. Their efforts helped the British war effort in the Middle East, but the British-Arab coalition was not as stable as it might have seemed.

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Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– National Portrait Gallery
– Boston Public Library
– IWM: Q 59294, Q 73536, Q 115096, Q 73535, Q 60212, Q 103747, Q 67234, Q 59703A, Q 59576, Q 58858A, Q 58861, Q 58863, Q 59193, Q 58823, Q 58938, Q 59078, Q 59190, Q 58841, Q 58704, Q 59422, Q 58891, Q 60035, Q 59073, Q 60102, Q 60096, HU 123936, Q 12629, Q 58752, Q 59314, Q 59314A, Q 58830, Q 58845, Q 12364, ART 3198, ART 2510, Q 105583, Q 103750, Q 59324, Q 59312, Q 12363, Q 103770, Q 86295, Q 59061, Q 72565, Q 12332

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago (edited)
Thats right, it’s Indy of Arabia! Even though “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” is a crew-favourite, we have waited with this episode until we could show off some exclusive material from the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” music video. With none other than Indy Neidell in the role of Lawrence (or Peter O’Toole?). This episode sure is among our favourite episodes to this date — we hope you enjoy it as well. If you do (and you weren’t already convinced by Joakim’s awesome Call To Action (17:20), please consider supporting this project on Patreon. It is thanks to those who are already there that we’re able to keep making these episodes! -> https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Cheers,
The Sabaton History Team

Anton Howes on the “improving mentality” of the British industrial revolution

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at some of the “bottom-up” educational initiatives that helped create and shape the industrial revolution:

I stumbled across a speech the other day, delivered by Dr Olinthus Gregory — the mathematics teacher at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich — to the Deptford Mechanics’ Institution. The mechanics’ institutions, or institutes, were created by working men pooling their savings to pay for lectures, libraries, educational equipment, news-rooms, and book clubs. They spearheaded Britain’s bottom-up approach to adult education, with the classes held in the evenings after work. But they’re a story for another time.

Diagram of a Watt steam engine from Practical physics for secondary schools (1913).
Wikimedia Commons.

What caught my eye was Gregory’s speech. Delivered in 1826, Britain’s industrial prowess was already obvious to many. The Industrial Revolution was already in full swing. Gregory paints the picture perfectly:

    Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, the arts, and sciences, useful and ornamental, in a copious and inexhaustible variety, enhance the conveniences and embellishments of this otherwise happy spot. Cities thronged with inhabitants, warehouses filled with stores, markets and fairs with busy rustics; fields, villages, roads, seaports, all contributing to the riches and glory of our land.

But there was more to be done. After all, everything can always be improved (an attitude that I call the improving mentality):

    Recollect farther, that every natural and every artificial advantage is susceptible of gradual progression, and trace the yearly elevation to higher perfection. New societies for improvement … new machines to advance our arts and facilitate labour; waste lands enclosed, roads improved, bridges erected, canals cut, tunnels excavated, marshes drained and cultivated, docks formed, ports enlarged: these and a thousand kindred operations which present themselves spontaneously to the mind’s eye, prove that we have not yet attained our zenith, and open an exquisite prospect of future stability and greatness.

Progress had been made, but there was always room for more.

As for the causes, Gregory had some interesting observations. Important, he said, was coal: “more valuable to us than the gold mines ever were to Spain, since without these the various metals could not be worked, and half our manufactories would be at a stand.”

But coal alone was not enough. There would be less output, of course, but he did not say that progress would have been stifled altogether (which is also more or less my own position). Also important was that inventors could persuade the government of the benefits of innovation, which is something I mentioned in my last email. As Gregory put it, Britain had “a government of whom the arts and sciences never crave audience in vain.”

And most important of all was Britain’s community of inventors and scientists, from the Boultons and Watts and Smeatons and Arkwrights and Bramahs, to the Donkins, Hornblowers, Trevithicks, Maudslays and Stephensons (only a few of whom are at all heard of today) …

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of Worlds

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 12 Apr 2018

Known as “the father of modern fantasy” his epic tales of legend and lore have been enjoyed by millions of people all over the world — devoured in popular books and adapted for Hollywood blockbuster films. Unbelievably bright, he was a distinguished university professor, poet, historian, and expert linguist. As a child, he even made up his own languages for pure fun.

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Crystal Sullivan
Producer – Samuel Avila
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

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December 19, 2019

Vive la Résistance! well, not really… French Resistance 1940 – WW2 – War Against Humanity 007

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 18 Dec 2019

Immediately after France is occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the French are divided about what to do; resist for collaborate? To put it mildly, it’s complicated.

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From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
16 hours ago
In the aftermath of WW2, everyone was probably pretty tired of the whole tragedy, and ready to just move on. Many of the people that I have met that lived through the war didn’t like talking about the war much. But somehow I had the privilege of getting many of the them that I met to open up and talk about it to me. Maybe not so much because of any personal quality I have other than being very persistent and curious — a pain in the neck is another way of putting it.

Anyway, we talked about many things, terrible things, great things, sad, and happy stories. But there was one thing I never heard anybody talk about, and that was indecision. Fear and regret, yes — everyone spoke of that, but not indecision. There was always an undertone of manifest destiny or complete meaninglessness.

But, when you think about it, how could you not be indecisive when faced with this kind of calamity? How can you not wonder if this is destiny, or just bad luck? How can you not be shocked into a stupor, at least at first? And even if you’re an ideologically convinced partisan or combatant, how do you know for sure what the right thing to do is? Well, when you start looking into it all, those questions were pretty much what gripped France in 1940 after the sudden, tragic loss of independence.

I think that indecision is not something we want to remember, perhaps we shouldn’t if we want to stay our course, perhaps we’re wired not to, so that we can focus better on what we finally decide. But for others who want to learn from our mistakes, and our successes — it is in the moment of indecision that we display our thinking, our reasoning, the true origin of our cause.

I should also tell you that I grew up in France, so this is in many ways the story of the adults around me when I was a child.

Sir Humphrey’s rebuttal to Sir Max on the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Times last weekend, Sir Max Hastings spent some time and effort to disparage the Royal Navy for commissioning the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and trotting out arguments against carriers that echo the criticisms of the cancelled CVA-01 program of the 1960s. Sir Humphrey characterizes Sir Max’s article as “ranting angrily about how the UK is an irrelevance now and how we don’t actually have any military power.”

HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.

Maybe it’s a generational thing and the fact that for the few remaining, and increasingly less relevant commentators of Sir Max’s elderly generation of OAPs, perhaps memories of their childhood and a sense of national malaise in the late 1940s and 50s has shaped their perception of the world today. The problem is that their view is utterly disconnected from reality, and their approach seems to be best characterised as to answer any question as “the UK is irrelevant, whats the question again”?

It is set against this backdrop of this article that it is worth reviewing why the Carrier force remains so relevant, and why the UK, despite the wishes of Sir Max remains relevant and credible globally. Carriers matter in simple terms because they allow the UK to embark an airwing, and military force, that can sail around the world on a self-sustaining basis and arrive ready to operate at a time and place of the British Governments choosing.

[…]

We like to permanently beat ourselves up as if we’re somehow failures, yet when push comes to shove, we seem to be remarkably good at not being failures. There is always a UK capability or asset that we can help with or support. Only this week the RAF sent an A400M to conduct search and rescue operations in Chile, while at the other end of the world, it finished providing air defence to Iceland with a Typhoon detachment. When disasters occur globally, the UK is always ready to send aid and assist, while in a crisis there is usually a UK military asset nearby that can help.

This reach is in part due to the fact that the UK has invested heavily in jointery and “fusion” bringing together departments and assets to work in a far more coherent and joined up way than most nations. As a nation we enjoy considerably more influence, reach and access than we think, and are usually at the cutting edge of efforts to improve capabilities too.

It is particularly frustrating then to see attacks on the existence of the carrier force in a way that treats this priceless national asset as if it is some kind of toy for the Royal Navy. It smacks of a total lack of understanding about how defence works in support of wider national security, and how joined up things really are these days.

The carrier is a national investment designed to provide a wide plethora of capabilities to support and defend the nation, and its allies, for decades to come. To see it purely through the prism of a myopic lens and an overt and tedious hatred of the Royal Navy for reasons more probably linked to events of the 1980s than any fact is fairly sad to observe.

To be honest this piece seems to mark yet another part of the opening of hostilities in the SDSR campaign. It seems intended to cause debate about the value of carriers and gently reinforce the message that somehow money should go elsewhere – ignoring the fact that this money has now been spent.

Its hard to understand what the thinking is here, but at its heart it feels like this is a piece intended to condition the public into thinking “the Navy and to a lesser extent the RAF has had lots of money wasted on it, lets go be nice to the Army for a change”. Such a view though is utterly removed from the reality of how defence works, but it feels as if it is intended to reinforce stereotypes that wouldn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

Modern Classics Summarized: A Christmas Carol

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 21 Dec 2018

Have a holly, jolly christmas! Spend time with your family, eat tons of good food, and don’t forget to ponder the looming specter of your mortality and the worth of how you’ve spent your fleeting existence!

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December 18, 2019

Adolf Hitler’s First Steps In Politics – The Foundation Of The Nazi Party I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 17 Dec 2019

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Like many former soldiers, lance corporal Adolf Hitler was disillusioned with the new German Republic after the Armistice in 1918. Like man of his country men he was also in dire need of a job. The Bavarian Army provided an opportunity and soon young Adolf Hitler found himself in the ranks of an obscure political party in Munich: The German Workers’ Party.

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» SOURCES
Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin.
Gottfried Feder, Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft 1919.
Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler. Eine Biographie, 1973.
Heiden, Konrad: Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Ein Mann gegen Europa, 2016.
Ulrich, Volker: Adolf Hitler. Band 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889-1939. 2013.
Fest, Joachim C: The face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. 1999
Program of the German Workers’ Party, 1920 (http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/s…)
Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919-1945, Vol. 1, The Rise to Power 1919-1934. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998, pp. 12-14.

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Mark Steyn on what passes as “conservatism” these days

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s certainly Conservative-In-Name-Only:

In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, the state appropriation of parenthood, voting rights for animals.

There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.

While we’re on the subject of the northern Tories: Because the late unlamented Andrew Scheer finessed his views on same-sex nuptials as lethargically as did Barack Obama, he was flayed by the Canadian media as some fire-and-brimstone social conservative of televangical inflexibility. I wish. As I wrote the other day, he’s as unmoored from principle as Boris Johnson, but without the countervailing strengths of being able to stick it to the other guy and to pass himself off as a human being. He was particularly contemptible in the hours before my appearance at the House of Commons Justice Committee, as I may discuss in detail one of these days. Yet the never-learn Conservatives are minded to replace an entirely hollow man with someone just like him, only more so.

It is surely telling that the only issues on which the right has made any progress at all in moving the ball in its direction — Brexit in the UK; illegal immigration and a belated honesty about the rise of China in the US — had to be injected into public discourse by two outsiders, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. And indeed in the teeth of opposition by the establishment’s catch-up conservatives.

Catch-up conservatism gives the game away: The right has lost the knack of persuasion, and increasingly doesn’t even bother to try.

Ballester-Molina Pistols from German Pocket Battleship Armor?

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Dec 2019

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There is an old gun shop tale that Argentine Ballester-Molina pistols were made form the salvaged armor plate of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The Graf Spee was scuttled in the Rio de la Plata estuary in December 1939, only a few miles from the HAFDASA factory in Buenos Aires, and Argentina did not have the domestic steel reserves to make enough pistols…

See Michael Parker’s full article on this, including the exact results of his metallurgical analysis, here:

https://www.americanrifleman.org/arti…

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History Summarized: Pope Fights

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Humour, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Aug 2018

The Medieval Catholic Church was … an interesting place, to put it lightly. Sometimes there was more than one Pope at a time, and sometimes they fought each other for power. Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you Pope Fights! The most absurd chapter in all of Catholicism.

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December 16, 2019

Captain Fraser’s Webley-Fosbery: WWI in Microcosm

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Dec 2017

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Captain Percy Fraser, DSO was born on January 22, 1879 and died in Ypres on the night of February 23, 1915 while attempting to aid men wounded outside their trench. His unit of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders would suffer horrendous casualties at Ypres, and today we will look at his Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver and his service in the British Army.

Thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage magazine for sharing Captain Fraser’s story and revolver. See his regular column here: https://armsheritagemagazine.com

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QotD: The Great Pestilence of 1348

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Long I have been curious about the Great Pestilence that trimmed the population of Britain and Europe by a third or more, in the fourteenth century. I make too much of it; the plague was a recurring event for centuries before and after. I notice from the tabloids that it is returning, through Africa this time. I know there will be pestilence to come, when we will all think it terribly important. It rivetted attention, I’m sure, in the autumn of 1348, and through the summer of 1349. And yet within a generation it is hardly mentioned.

England, below the Ribble and Tees, is special, thanks to the Domesday Book of the invading, tax-loving Normans, and their general propensity to good record-keeping. The towns and villages ennumerated in 1086 can be traced to the present day; nineteen in twenty are still there. Having figures to start, and through the parish books later, we can track an economic and demographic history with an accuracy possible in no other country. We can know, for instance, of the population boom through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which had slackened well before the “Black Death.” And with that boom, impressive advances in farming, technology, and building, as today. Nothing conduces to technical improvement, as a bit of crowding.

This proportion I cited — the nineteen-in-twenty (or more) — which I have from reading in economic history mostly years ago, fascinates my attention. We know large tracts were depopulated, we find the archaeological evidence easily enough. They were planting rye within the walls of Winchester, and many other towns. Everywhere, they had elbow-room again. Our deep ecologists would have been pleased — those who think life on this planet would be better had a few billion souls not been born. As Christianity, and environmentalism, are mortally opposed, and the fourteenth century was overwhelmingly Christian, I expect complaints of overpopulation were differently expressed at the time. Mostly it would have been moaning from younger brothers about the distribution of inherited land.

Always, there have been younger brothers. Always, there have been survivors. What delighted me was the speed with which all the vacant places were filled. As we’ve seen, too, after ghastly wars, demography abhors a vacuum.

David Warren, “Death the real illusion”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-11-04.

December 15, 2019

Policing London – The Bow Street Runners – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 14 Dec 2019

Henry Fielding was a dangerous man … with a pen. He had a razor-sharp wit and created the page-turner novel, but that’s not what we want to focus on here. Because Henry Fielding is also responsible for assembling London’s first organized police force. The Bow Street Runners were inspired by Wilde’s operation just … not corrupt. But Fielding quickly found that in London’s justice system, corruption was the assumed default, not the exception. He certainly had his work cut out for him!

Henry Fielding – Everything Wilde did but you know… without the whole… being morally bankrupt bit.

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